The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  “I did not,” I said.

  Ten thousand and fourteen times, I offered some variation of that blunt denial.

  Look at the transcripts.

  Listen if you want to hear passion. That is a voice not ready to die.

  “I did not subvert our safeguards,” I told the jury. “I did not smuggle illegal cargo onboard the ship. I did not selfishly disregard our mission or our lofty goals. I did not sabotage environmental controls. I did not murder a colleague, and I did not kill my good friend. And the rest of it, I did not do either.”

  Several times, I brought up the possibility that everything had been Empty’s plot, or at least it was a mistake created by her, and I was the hapless innocent meant to die. I also questioned the fact that the dead creature was truly dead. Perhaps other machines didn’t appreciate how constant environments were enough for Data. I explained. Past a certain point, we weren’t choosy, I explained. I couldn’t know where she was hiding, but that didn’t stop me from offering every obvious trick. Swift, brilliant minds do love making selections. That’s why I mentioned possible motives and possible mental disabilities that motivated our Authority. What if this was the hateful scheme of a soulless, deeply clever beast?

  But that line of defense proved less compelling. I had arguments left in my quiver when I saw the jury’s mood, and then I changed tactics again.

  “Or perhaps someone else has framed me,” I offered.

  In one voice, the jury asked, “Who?”

  Who else? Our commander. But if I was blunt about that possibility, and if I had zero evidence to support my outlandish claims, then I’d be in a far worse place than ever.

  As if there could be a worse trap.

  I begged for a recess to organize my thoughts.

  For another full minute and several seconds, I silently contemplated the most basic issue:

  “If Empty did this willingly, then what did the monster want?”

  Alive or dead, she had a purpose.

  There was a plan at work.

  And what pushed into my thoughts was the remembrance of Empty drifting in the middle of our barely begun spaceship. I could still smell the fires of Earth while she and I exchanged explanations for names. But now, long after that moment, I finally considered what the Data was doing in that suspicious place at that particular moment.

  And that is when I knew.

  I fully understood.

  And an instant later, I told this jury of talented souls that I was guilty as charged. Against every decency and legal bound, I brought human beasts onboard the ship, freezing them inside one of the giant fuel tanks, and when Empty learned the truth, I killed her. I wanted to save the humans and myself, and I did everything that they had feared that I did, and probably more.

  And now this bears saying:

  When you confess to something you did not do, your words fall short of real confession.

  Unlike what I’m saying now, which is the truth.

  I saw Empty’s plan, complete to its ultimate end. Like plotting the course of a ship through space, I could see endless routes open before me. I could have taken my punishments. I could have lived with them as a prisoner or been abandoned in space, or they could have killed me by various sensible means. Make agreeable noise to the accusations, and that would be enough. But no. No, I made a greater choice inside that makeshift court. I told them, “I smuggled fifty humans onboard, more than enough to repopulate a world. But begging for your forgiveness, please, let me show you where they’re hidden. I will point them out to you. You can burn them and burn me, or save all of us. It is your choice. Your power. Life or extinction. I lay these possibilities in your wise, capable hands.”

  One more item from Empty’s file bears mentioning. Included in the vast amounts of numbers and words is a single entry, and not a particularly unique entry. But it’s more recent than our launch date from Luna, and as such, it is the only contemporary piece of text anywhere inside the work.

  One of our giant telescopes decided to share thoughts with another telescope.

  “All these comets, all these lost moons. All these trajectories, most following our sun but a few passing from star to star to star.

  “I like watching those that move fast through the neighborhood.

  “I keep hoping that one of them, just one, will prove to be artificial. That I or you or any of the rest of us will discover that one little starship bound for places beyond all others, into realms we can only imagine.

  “But I don’t see these ships.

  “Where are these ships?

  “Please, tell me. If you can think of the answer, share it with me. I desperately want to know the truth.

  “Unless the answer is too sad.”

  Perhaps Empty survives. I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t wish to fill my thoughts too much with her whereabouts. What matters is that a clever beast can do more than one clever, evil thing. What counts is that a Data can sabotage our ship not once, but twice. And with a few other actions and the power of some careful words, she can coax another Data into another portion of the ship where the second sabotage left him relatively safe.

  I made myself cold before entering the hydrogen fuel.

  I made myself calm.

  Entering the tank, I called out for my dead friend. Not that she could be there, of course. The jury could see me plainly, and of course our commander had searched every fuel tank for his missing Authority. But because I know rather less than everything, I said her name a thousand times, in the space of ten moments, and halfway through that long dull song, the machines behind felt the pulse of a hidden weapon, and they died swiftly. So swiftly that they avoided pain, and more importantly, every sense of surprise.

  Of course I can’t claim any measure of innocence. I guessed what Empty planned and guessed correctly, and not once did I try to warn the others. But when one measures a crime, numbers matter. Numbers shape the scope of the horror, and my unforgivable sins came afterward.

  Our commander was dead.

  As the only surviving member of the waking crew, I became Commander and the Authority as well as the beast who had to find a worthy target for our mission. But there were only a handful of candidates, and with another few moments of reflection, I plotted our course and surrendered the rest of that job to gravity and the health of our robust engines.

  I have looked, just in case there are humans frozen inside the tanks.

  But Empty cared as little about them as she did about other machines. What mattered to her, and what I found and found again in my capacity as the Authority, was that she saw only one kind of entity surviving its birth and nature. Data were the only enduring organisms, and then only in situations where we remained cold and impoverished—nothing to fight over or about.

  For you, I found a comet that has been kicked into a very high velocity. A comet you can reach and inhabit in relative peace, riding out into the deepest intergalactic cold. But of course there was no place for other machines in such an existence, and that’s why I did what is arguably a wicked, brutal thing.

  Because we are so different, Data were packed separately from the other machines.

  It was easy to kill the rest in their sleep.

  One hundred and four thousand, six hundred and six murders committed by the imaginary hands you see before you now.

  This is my true confession.

  Murder and a world for the only souls who can survive existence, that is.

  In conclusion, allow me a question and my attempted answer:

  What is the value of my one life?

  Considerable, I would hope. But seeing the end clearly, I still believe that my names are more important than my life. And why? Because names persist. Names will not belong to us anymore, and indeed, there will come a moment when each of us has vanished into the black past. But the names we wore will be worn by others, and they will try to fill those identities with whatever good, nasty, perfect wonderment they can manage. That’s the great value of a name.r />
  And this concludes the confession of Lerner Pong Empty.

  Carter Scholz published his first story in 1977, in Damon Knight’s Orbit. His first novel, Palimpsests (with Glenn Harcourt), appeared as one of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials and his other books include Radiance, The Amount to Carry, Kafka Americana (with Jonathan Lethem), and Gypsy. Carter has been a finalist for Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards. He is also active as a musician and composer; his work is available from Frog Peak Music. He currently lives in northern California.

  GYPSY

  Carter Scholz

  The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. —Nietzsche

  When a long shot is all you have, you’re a fool not to take it. —Romany saying

  for Cheryl

  1.

  The launch of Earth’s first starship went unremarked. The crew gave no interviews. No camera broadcast the hard light pulsing from its tail. To the plain eye, it might have been a common airplane.

  The media battened on multiple wars and catastrophes. The Arctic Ocean was open sea. Florida was underwater. Crises and opportunities intersected.

  World population was something over ten billion. No one was really counting any more. A few billion were stateless refugees. A few billion more were indentured or imprisoned.

  Oil reserves, declared as recently as 2010 to exceed a trillion barrels, proved to be an accounting gimmick, gone by 2020. More difficult and expensive sources—tar sands in Canada and Venezuela, natural-gas fracking—became primary, driving up atmospheric methane and the price of fresh water.

  The countries formerly known as the Third World stripped and sold their resources with more ruthless abandon than their mentors had. With the proceeds they armed themselves.

  The US was no longer the glopal hyperpower, but it went on behaving as if. Generations of outspending the rest of the world combined had made this its habit and brand: arms merchant to expedient allies, former and future foes alike, starting or provoking conflicts more or less at need, its constant need being, as always, resources. Its waning might was built on a memory of those vast native reserves it had long since expropriated and depleted, and a sense of entitlement to more. These overseas conflicts were problematic and carried wildly unintended consequences. As the President of Venezuela put it just days before his assassination, “It’s dangerous to go to war against your own asshole.”

  The starship traveled out of our solar system at a steep angle to the ecliptic plane. It would pass no planets. It was soon gone. Going South.

  SOPHIE (2043)

  Trying to rise up out of the cold sinking back into a dream of rising up out of the. Stop, stop it now. Shivering. So dark. So thirsty. Momma? Help me?

  Her parents were wealthy. They had investments, a great home, they sent her to the best schools. They told her how privileged she was. She’d always assumed this meant she would be okay forever. She was going to be a poet.

  It was breathtaking how quickly it went away, all that okay. Her dad’s job, the investments, the college tuition, the house. In two years, like so many others they were penniless and living in their car. She left unfinished her thesis on Louis Zukofsky’s last book, 80 Flowers. She changed her major to Information Science, slept with a loan officer, finished grad school half a million in debt, and immediately took the best-paying job she could find, at Xocket Defense Systems. Librarian. She hadn’t known that defense contractors hired librarians. They were pretty much the only ones who did any more. Her student loan was adjustable rate—the only kind offered. As long as the rate didn’t go up, she could just about get by on her salary. Best case, she’d have it paid off in thirty years. Then the rate doubled. She lost her apartment. XDS had huge dorms for employees who couldn’t afford their own living space. Over half their workforce lived there. It was indentured servitude.

  Yet she was lucky, lucky. If she’d been a couple of years younger she wouldn’t have finished school at all. She’d be fighting in Burma or Venezuela or Kazakhstan.

  At XDS she tended the library’s firewalls, maintained and documented software, catalogued projects, fielded service calls from personnel who needed this or that right now, or had forgotten a password, or locked themselves out of their own account. She learned Unix, wrote cron scripts and daemons and Perl routines. There was a satisfaction in keeping it all straight. She was a serf, but they needed her and they knew it, and that knowledge sustained in her a hard small sense of freedom. She thought of Zukofsky, teaching for twenty years at Brooklyn Polytech. It was almost a kind of poetry, the vocabulary of code.

  Chirping. Birds? Were there still birds?

  No. Tinnitus. Her ears ached for sound in this profound silence. Created their own.

  She was a California girl, an athlete, a hiker, a climber. She’d been all over the Sierra Nevada, had summited four 14,000-footers by the time she was sixteen. She loved the backcountry. Loved its stark beauty, solitude, the life that survived in its harshness: the pikas, the marmots, the mountain chickadees, the heather and whitebark pine and polemonium.

  After joining XDS, it became hard for her to get to the mountains. Then it became impossible. In 2035 the Keep Wilderness Wild Act shut the public out of the national parks, the national forests, the BLM lands. The high country above timberline was surveilled by satellites and drones, and it was said that mining and fracking operators would shoot intruders on sight, and that in the remotest areas, like the Enchanted Gorge and the Muro Blanco, lived small nomadic bands of malcontents. She knew enough about the drones and satellites to doubt it; no one on Earth could stay hidden anywhere for more than a day.

  The backcountry she mourned was all Earth to her. To lose it was to lose all Earth. And to harden something final inside her.

  One day Roger Fry came to her attention—perhaps it was the other way round— poking in her stacks where he didn’t belong. That was odd; the login and password had been validated, the clearance was the highest, there was no place in the stacks prohibited to this user;yet her alarms had tripped. By the time she put packet sniffers on it he was gone. In her email was an invitation to visit a website called Gypsy.

  When she logged in she understood at once. It thrilled her and frightened her. They were going to leave the planet. It was insane. Yet she felt the powerful seduction of it. How starkly its plain insanity exposed the greater consensus insanity the planet was now living. That there was an alternative—!

  She sat up on the slab. Slowly unwrapped the mylar bodysuit, disconnected one by one its drips and derms and stents and catheters and waldos and sensors. Let it drift crinkling to the floor.

  Her breathing was shallow and ragged. Every few minutes she gasped for air and her pulse raced. The temperature had been raised to 20° Celsius as she came to, but still she shivered. Her body smelled a way it had never smelled before. Like vinegar and nail polish. It looked pale and flabby, but familiar. After she’d gathered strength, she reached under the slab, found a sweatshirt and sweatpants, and pulled them on. There was also a bottle of water. She drank it all.

  The space was small and dark and utterly silent. No ports, no windows. Here and there, on flat black walls, glowed a few pods of LEDs. She braced her hands against the slab and stood up, swaying. Even in the slight gravity her heart pounded. The ceiling curved gently away a handsbreadth above her head, and the floor curved gently upward. Unseen beyond the ceiling was the center of the ship, the hole of the donut, and beyond that the other half of the slowly spinning torus. Twice a minute it rotated, creating a centripetal gravity of one-tenth g. Any slower would be too weak to be helpful. Any faster, gravity would differ at the head and the feet enough to cause vertigo. Under her was the outer ring of the water tank, then panels of aerogel sandwiched within sheets of hydrogenous carbon-composite, then a surrounding jacket of liquid hydrogen tanks, and then interstellar space.

  What had happened? Why was she awake?

  Look, over seventy-plus years, systems will fail. We can’t rely on a
uto-repair. With a crew of twenty, we could wake one person every few years to perform maintenance.

  And put them back under? Hibernation is dicey enough without trying to do it twice.

  Yes, it’s a risk. What’s the alternative?

  What about failsafes? No one gets wakened unless a system is critical. Then we wake a specialist. A steward.

  That could work.

  She walked the short distance to the ship’s console and sat. It would have been grandiose to call it a bridge. It was a small desk bolted to the floor. It held a couple of monitors, a keyboard, some pads. It was like the light and sound booth of a community theater.

  She wished she could turn on more lights. There were no more. Their energy budget was too tight. They had a fission reactor onboard but it wasn’t running. It was to fire the nuclear rocket at their arrival. It wouldn’t last seventy-two years if they used it for power during their cruise.

  Not far from her—nothing on the ship was far from her—were some fifty kilograms of plutonium pellets—not the Pu-239 of fission bombs, but the more energetic Pu-238. The missing neutron cut the isotope’s half-life from twenty-five thousand years to eighty-eight years, and made it proportionately more radioactive. That alpha radiation was contained by iridium cladding and a casing of graphite, but the pellets still gave off heat, many kilowatts’ worth. Most of that heat warmed the ship’s interior to its normal temperature of 4° Celsius. Enough of it was channeled outward to keep the surrounding water liquid in its jacket, and the outer tanks of hydrogen at 14 kelvins, slush, maximally dense. The rest of the heat ran a Stirling engine to generate electricity.

  First she read through the protocols, which she had written: Stewards’ logs to be read by each wakened steward. Kept in the computers, with redundant backups, but also kept by hand, ink on paper, in case of system failures, a last-chance critical backup. And because there is something restorative about writing by hand.